It didn't go full speed until Sun released HotSpot, which was probably a year or two later. The farther back in time you go, naturally, the slower Java was, sort of like the universe as you go back to the Big Bang. You also could have made more in the stock market with each receding year. But 1999 was a memorable year.
Java 1.2 (1998) used a JIT and a generational collector. It was probably faster than today's Ruby, Python, or PHP.
What was slow was start up. Applets in particular were really horrible since they completely froze the browser for several seconds.
If I remember correctly, this was finally fixed many years later with some version of Java 6.0.